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You know, maybe it’s time I just…embraced my cloneage. Went on Oprah. We could be famous, you and me.
We can make that happen.
Sarah has been following this ironed-out version of herself with a sort of confused numbness for hours. Rachel moves through the world like a scalpel – cutting with a sort of expert precision, all sharp edges in her delicate fingers and the cut of her blazer. Sarah keeps wanting to open her mouth and say it was a joke, it was supposed to catch you off-guard, you don’t own me, but this whole situation is so – surreal that all she can do is follow. Just a few hours ago she was being arrested. Just a few hours before that Sarah crouched on the dirt floor of Siobhan’s basement and told Helena she wasn’t her sister. Helena had licked her lips.
“I’m sure this is all plenty to take in,” says the latest version of Sarah in the elevator in what’s apparently her apartment building, voice gravelly and amused. Her accent makes Sarah feel grimy, like she’s still covered in London soot. The walls on the inside of the elevator are mirrored. That doesn’t help.
“Your people took me out of prison and now you lot want to put me on television,” Sarah mutters, not making eye contact. “Plenty to take in doesn’t even cover it.”
“The wheels move fast,” Rachel murmurs, looking down as her phone buzzes impatiently. She taps something out and adds: “We’ve been looking for you for a long time.” On the last word her eyes flick up to Sarah, sharp and curious. Sarah thinks about Helena again; her own gaze darts away, watches the numbers tick up.
“So, what,” she says, fidgeting, “Oprah? Seriously?”
Rachel huffs out an amused breath through her nose; she’s back to looking at her phone, which keeps urgently buzzing. Her thumbs are flying over the keys. “I’m afraid not,” she says. “Press conference.”
“How you gonna prove we’re not just twins,” Sarah says.
“We have our ways,” Rachel says, and slips her phone back into her bag. Her head tilts to the side curiously, and she says: “Do you trust us, Sarah?”
“God no,” Sarah says, “seeing as I’m not an idiot.”
Rachel actually smiles. It looks strange on her face. “Good answer.”
The doors to the elevator open and Rachel neatly exits; there’s a lot of space, so Sarah doesn’t understand how Rachel manages to brush up against her. The air smells floral for a moment, bruised. And then Rachel is walking down the hallway – she doesn’t even turn around, like she knows Sarah is going to follow her.
And Sarah does.
Sarah Manning looks out of place in Rachel’s apartment, but then again of course she does. Rachel built this place herself, with care – a glass and steel frame made only for her. Sarah looks like an oil spill. Sarah looks like a stain. Sarah looks like the butterfly flapping its wings, singing earthquake.
She shouldn’t interest Rachel. But then again of course she does.
“Drink?” she asks, setting down her briefcase and continuing to put out fires as she goes. Aldous keeps texting her asking for updates, like a father hovering protectively over his daughter’s playdate. She keeps reminding him to deal with the other two subjects – Dr. Cormier has gone rogue, and Alison is suspicious of her monitor, it’s perfectly likely she won’t sign – and yet. Between that and the constant stream of smaller, more mundane inquiries, there almost isn’t room in her head to deal with: Sarah, here, wandering around her apartment. Lioness caged, finally.
“Bourbon,” Sarah says, and the word sounds like a challenge. It is, to be perfectly honest – Rachel only has one bottle of bourbon, and it’s in the top cabinet. She would ask Daniel to get it, but he’s outside the door. A thin attempt to make Sarah more comfortable; more than that, a way for Rachel to cling – just for a little while – to the illusion that she is separate from the other subjects. That she is unmonitored. That they, at this moment, are unmonitored.
She stretches, slightly, pulls it down. She can feel Sarah’s eyes on the stretch of her muscles as she goes. The feeling is familiar. Only it’s familiar, for her, from the other end – her own eyes watching.
How curious, to be the one under the observation of her own eyes. How strange.
She pours Sarah the bourbon and pushes it across the counter as she fixes her own drink. She can hear Sarah’s footsteps on the floor as she wanders over, downs it all in one go. She makes a face. Rachel pours her own wine and takes one delicate sip before looking expectantly at Sarah. Her double is shifting from foot to foot, looking horribly uncomfortable. Good.
“Always hated makeovers,” Sarah says. “Fe—I used to get them all the time. The worst.”
“It’ll be fine,” Rachel says with false warmth, and reaches out to place light fingertips against Sarah’s bicep. “I’ll take good care of you.”
“Yeah,” Sarah says, “that’s what I’m worried about.”
Sarah drank the bourbon too fast but she can’t help it: this place reeks of money so hard it makes her teeth hurt. She feels like someone’s going to get stabbed. She doesn’t know what sort of feng shui bullshit you pull to always make your guests feel like they’re going to get stabbed, but apparently it’s been managed.
She follows Rachel into Rachel’s bedroom, where there is a flatscreen television and a bed with approximately ten million pillows. She should have had another bourbon. Should have taken Rachel’s glass of wine. Should make her excuses now and go meet Amelia, but: what if they follow her? And: Cosima’s earnest voice, give it a try Sarah, and Rachel’s own curious murmur: we’ve been waiting for you. Bourbon pounding sour in Sarah’s temples. Mistake! Mistake! She doesn’t move.
“Do you have any preferences,” Rachel murmurs, opening the door to her wardrobe, and Sarah wants to run so badly that her legs actually hurt.
“Why is it,” she says, leaning on the wall, “that I couldn’t go back to Beth’s place?”
She knows the answer. It’s in the curl of Rachel’s fingers over her wardrobe door – Rachel’s fingers, Rachel’s wardrobe door, Rachel’s apartment, Rachel’s bourbon sending warmth through Sarah’s stomach. Rachel and her people, whoever the hell they are, want it very clear who Sarah is getting into bed with. They want a matched set.
“No time, I’m afraid,” Rachel says with no attempt to be convincing. She’s rummaging through hangers, lips slightly pursed. Sarah knows too many slight variations on that face, and it makes her heart pang with something familiar and loving and horribly, terribly out of place.
“What do you even have,” she says, stepping forward so that she’s slightly behind Rachel. She can smell flowers again. Like hell does she know what kind.
Rachel shoves hangers aside – there’s a white dress, white blazer over it. Sarah thinks to herself: never in a million years. She scoffs, steps backwards and wanders in a direction something like away.
“I’m not wearin’ a skirt,” she says. “You can piss off.”
Rachel makes a sort of considering mm sound, turns around. Her eyes scrape up and down Sarah’s body. “Can you not walk in one?” she says. Sarah shoots her an unimpressed look: weak, Duncan.
“Caught me,” she says. “Now I’m gonna put on your bloody clothes just to prove you wrong. Look at bloody Machiavelli over here!” She keeps pacing.
Rachel exhales through her nose; Sarah can’t tell if she’s pushed a button, or if Rachel thinks she’s charming. Doesn’t know which one is worse, in all honesty. There’s a clicking of hangers and, when Sarah looks back over, Rachel has her eyebrows raised expectantly. From somewhere she’s pulled a white suit that makes Sarah’s heart give a sour pang – it reminds her of the one she wore to Beth’s hearing, what feels like years ago.
“Fine,” Sarah says, and yanks the hanger out of Rachel’s hand.
Sarah changes in Rachel’s bathroom; she shoves her way in and then Rachel can hear the defiant click of the lock. It’s an amusing show of modesty – what, exactly, does she think she has to hide? But Rachel doesn’t stop her. A locked door doesn’t mean anything, she wants to explain. After a while you realize that you have more power if you leave it unlocked. But she doubts Sarah would understand. Sarah Manning, runaway; Sarah Manning, outing Beth’s monitor in the blink of an eye, sending him stumbling into love with her in less time than that. Rachel admits, privately, that she can see the appeal – can understand how Paul Dierden, loyal company man, had somehow given up everything for this. For the woman in Rachel’s bathroom, probably standing with her hands planted on the counter and staring desperately into the mirror. Why am I doing this. Why am I here.
Rachel keeps remembering, over and over again, that when Sarah steps out of the door she’ll be dressed in Rachel’s clothes. An old suit, certainly, one that she’s never worn – but. Hers. Her clothing, tailored to her body, settling on Sarah’s skin. They’d tried for so long to hunt her down and here she is: a wolf in Rachel’s clothing. Something akin to happiness simmers low in Rachel’s stomach. She exhales through her nose and wanders over to the glass wall of her bedroom, stares outside at the city below. The whole world going on all around with no idea. As if nothing’s changed. As if the earthquake isn’t coming, enough to rock the world.
The door clicks and Rachel can hear the quiet pad of Sarah’s bare feet on the floor. She watches Sarah’s reflection in the window, a vague blurry shape – like she’s underwater, like Rachel has drowned her. Rachel turns around.
Sarah is glaring at her, mouth a flat unimpressed line, and there hadn’t been a shirt on the hanger so the blazer dips dangerously low and all Rachel can see are her collarbones, the swell of her breasts. Rachel would never, but on Sarah it looks natural – looks, honestly, more natural than it would otherwise. The suit is perfectly-cut, but Rachel knew that. She feels a stir of something warm for Sarah – now that she is, a little bit, Rachel’s. I’ll take good care of you.
“I trust it fits,” she says, walking past Sarah to get into the bathroom. Sarah huffs a breath out through her nose, doesn’t answer. Rachel nods her chin in the direction of the wadded-up ball of clothing Sarah is cradling like a child. “You can burn those.”
Sarah lets out a surprised laugh, sound loud and shocking as breaking glass. She stares at Rachel, spooked at her own noise; Rachel is sure she’s giving Sarah a more smothered variation of the same expression.
“Not gonna give you the satisfaction,” she says, and wanders over to Rachel’s wardrobe – presumably to throw them in a pile at the bottom of the closet, like an animal. Rachel sighs slightly, pulls out her makeup bag and straightening iron.
“You can sit at the table in the main room,” she says without inflection. But Sarah doesn’t troop out to the living room – instead she follows Rachel into the bathroom, as if it’s interesting, as if she wasn’t just there. She watches Rachel in the mirror. “You live alone here?” she asks.
“No one is going to walk in, if that’s what worries you,” Rachel says, knowing full well that isn’t what worries her. She hands Sarah the straightening iron. “Take this out and plug it in, please, there’s a socket on the pillar.”
“Yes ma’am,” Sarah mutters, and Rachel takes those words, irons them out in her mind until they sound sincere and then…inspects them, for a while, just to see. She can hear Sarah setting up; she takes her bag, follows her out, puts down the assorted supplies. Sarah hasn’t sat down; she’s circling the table, like a shark. Rachel eyes her sharply until Sarah runs an anxious hand through her hair and sits. Her heels bounce against the floor.
Rachel picks up a brush and starts working it – with effort – through Sarah’s hair. Sarah’s neck keeps bending when Rachel pulls the brush, but her spine is rigid; she’s obviously trying very hard to hold still. Rachel’s hair hasn’t been this length since she was fourteen years old, and it’s strange to feel between her hands again. This hair: hers. And falling over the shoulders of her blazer—
“I can straighten my own hair, thanks,” Sarah mutters, fingers knotting together and unknotting almost too fast for Rachel to watch.
“I know,” Rachel says. Doesn’t say: but you’re going to let me anyways, aren’t you. She wonders when the last time is that Sarah sat still for long enough for anyone to touch her hair. She considers.
The straightening iron is warm enough, now, and Rachel works serum into Sarah’s hair and starts straightening it. Neither of them mention the almost unnoticeable desperate sound Sarah makes at the feeling of Rachel’s fingers working through her hair. Rachel notes it, though, files it away. Sarah keeps letting things loose, just little pieces between her fingers – and Rachel is kind enough to save each and every one.
Fight or flight has been battering at Sarah’s limbs for so long that she’s passed through it, into some sort of dull haze where she feels alright sitting still. Everything is fine. There are cool fingertips tipping her chin up, and in the chair across from Sarah her own clone is studying her and painting some sort of bloody contour on her face and that’s fine, it’s all fine.
“Who taught you how to do this,” she says, without moving her lips too much. (Felix would hit her with one of the makeup brushes—) (she shouldn’t be thinking about Felix, it feels like a betrayal.)
“I taught myself,” Rachel murmurs, and she tilts Sarah’s head from side to side, gives a considering hum, picks up a makeup brush and blends. Her fingers are steady, grabbing Sarah’s chin, and Sarah can’t remember the last time someone held her steady like that, and that makes her hot and sick and nauseous and she blurts out: “Impressive.”
Rachel’s eyes narrow as she tries to find some sort of mockery; her face flattens out, goes eerie smooth. “Thank you,” she says. She clicks open an eyeshadow palette, says: “Close your eyes, please.”
Sarah does. The world goes dark. Rachel’s knee is lightly tapping hers, and the air in the apartment is cold and smells like perfume a little bit, and she can hear Rachel breathing, and it’s too much and she wants to open her eyes again but there’s an eyeshadow brush tickling her eyelid and she doesn’t.
“Your mum didn’t,” she blurts, even though that’s a shitty question, even though Sarah – anyways.
“My mother died when I was a child,” Rachel says without any particular emotion. She switches to Sarah’s other eyelid.
“Oh,” Sarah says. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Rachel says, still in that same flat voice. “I had a perfectly acceptable guardian, and of course the DYAD has taken care of me.”
“Of course,” Sarah says, voice just as flat as Rachel’s.
“We do have your best interests at heart,” Rachel says, and there is a feeling: something desperate, something sad. Rachel is playing her, definitely, unless she isn’t. Sarah can’t tell in the dark.
“Like they had yours,” Sarah says, and she knows she sounds unimpressed.
“Yes, exactly,” Rachel says. Her hand lands warm on Sarah’s knee. Very warm. She’d thought – not that she’d thought about it – but she’d thought that Rachel’s hands would be cold. But no. Her hand isn’t cold at all. And Rachel is murmuring to her, like a secret that only the two of them know – that the DYAD can protect her, that the DYAD can protect her whole family, that Sarah can finally stop running, that she’ll have a place to rest. And the brush leaves Sarah’s eyelid; Rachel says “open.”
Sarah does. She can’t stop breaking open Rachel’s face with her eyes, desperately searching for something sincere – as if this beartrap with Sarah’s face would suddenly change into a safe place, if Sarah just looked long enough. If she just wanted it.
Rachel looks at her, tilts her head, says: “Hm.” Her hand leaves Sarah’s knee, thumb brushing along the side of her kneecap as it does. Her fingertips drift over the orderly lines of pencils and brushes on the table and linger over what looks to Sarah like a torture device but what she knows is an eyelash curler.
“Not on your life,” she says. “Gonna rip my bloody eyelid off with that.”
“I’ve been curling my eyelashes since I was thirteen,” Rachel says offhandedly. “I can assure you I don’t have trembling hands.”
“Yeah,” Sarah says. “Your eyelashes.”
“Exactly,” Rachel says. In her eyes there is something like a challenge.
Out of some instinct Sarah doesn’t know she leans forward, into the space between them. Her hand rests on Rachel’s leg – palm splayed over the space where Rachel’s skirt ends and the warm skin of her leg begins. Sarah’s face is inches from Rachel’s face. She doesn’t break eye contact.
“Go on, then,” she says.
“Don’t blink,” Rachel says back. The words leave her mouth as a soft breath. Sarah dreams she can see the pulse beating like a trapped hummingbird in Rachel’s throat. When is the last time that somebody touched you, she imagines saying. Imagines breathing those words so close to Rachel that they float into her mouth, become Rachel’s words instead. Imagines.
“Hurry up,” Sarah says, “or I won’t have a choice.”
Rachel’s fingers tip Sarah’s chin up again. Is it Sarah’s imagination or did her leg move a little bit under Sarah’s hand? Are Rachel’s legs parting? Is she dreaming? Her vision waters. The jaws of the eyelash curler settle cold and silver and cold around Sarah’s eyelashes. Rachel pulls it, trigger. It does not bite at Sarah’s skin.
(It could. She could. She could rip off Sarah’s eyelid, now, and it would be easy. One slipped centimeter. The absentminded brush of Sarah’s thumb against the edge of her skirt, under the fabric and over it and around. Rachel could clamp those silver teeth down on the tissue-thin skin of Sarah’s eyelid and blame it on that.
When is the last time that somebody touched her. She could blame it on that.)
And then it’s done, and Rachel leans back and goes to do the other eye. Neither of them have commented on the way that Sarah’s thumb is trailing circles over Rachel’s thigh, the skin under her skirt. Sarah should say something about it; she should apologize. But in this weird fucked-up game they’re playing she understands this as a loss. She keeps not blinking, over and over again, endless seconds of not blinking at all. The vision in her left eye is all silver, the clamp filling her vision. With her right eye she watches Rachel’s face – curious, emotionless, intent. Rachel moves in a way that says she always understands what she’s doing, that she always knows exactly where to place her hands.
Sarah has never known where to place her hands.
It’s not her imagination. Rachel’s legs are a little wider apart than when Sarah leaned in – Rachel opening up slow, slow, slower. Sarah feels that weird sweet-sick lurch she gets in her stomach before she’s about to do something dangerous – when she sees a girl across the room at a bar, when she tries out some new drug. The girl, the drug. Rachel with the mascara wand pressed to Sarah’s eyelashes.
“What do you get out of this,” she says.
Rachel blinks at her rapidly, goes back to placing the mascara precisely in the line of its fellows. “It’s my chance to be a part of the DYAD’s brave new step towards the—”
“Bullshit,” Sarah says. “I want to hear you say it.”
“Say what.”
“You like this,” Sarah whispers, feeling her voice drop low. Her hand on Rachel’s thigh goes still. She’s still leaned forward, even though it means Rachel has to twist awkwardly to reach the table. The brush of Rachel’s shoulder against Sarah’s skin, and the whole world smelling like crushed flowers, and Rachel likes this. “You like making me into you.”
Rachel is still looking at her in a way that can’t be described with any other word than studying. “I like it,” she says, and the words are a whisper that sounds like fog rolling in and drowning out the whole world. The lie sound is so strong, when she says I like it. Rachel’s tongue pressed to her teeth. Sarah’s tongue too big for her mouth, she’s swallowing, her heart is a terrified bird in flight. Her heart is a firing squad, a swan dive, a photograph of a bomb caught mid-explosion.
“So what do you want,” she rasps. All of her fingers slip underneath Rachel’s skirt. Rachel’s thigh is warm. Sarah keeps being surprised, at how warm Rachel’s skin is.
What does she want. It’s only that I don’t know, she thinks of saying, I’ve never known, but that’s a lie – not a convincing one, not with too much of her mind focused solely and entirely on Sarah’s left hand.
“Say it,” Sarah says again.
Here is what Rachel should say: get out. She should have known. Paul fell for Sarah, and the other subjects fell for Sarah, and Aldous fell for Sarah. Rachel’s entire life a chain of dominoes, and she should have known.
She can’t speak. It’s too much of a gamble. She knows what the dark in Sarah’s eyes is saying, the weight of her palm starting to sweat against Rachel’s skin, but she can’t articulate. Shouldn’t articulate. Should never let these words be something that she says out loud – because it’s the sort of sentence that ruins everything.
She says it anyways.
“Kiss me.” The words are an order. They are. They’re an order, they’re a command, they’re iron clamped between Rachel’s teeth. But Sarah shakes her head.
“No,” she says lightly, “that isn’t what I said.”
“Isn’t it?”
Sarah’s hand is moving just a little higher, just a little. Her fingertips inches from lace. “Told you to tell me what you want, Rachel.” Her voice is a rasp, dry as bones, her eyes unfocused. Is this how she was with Paul, Rachel thinks. Is it that easy. Is everyone just a series of walls you break down with the warm skin of your hands.
“You want me to beg,” Rachel says. “I won’t.”
Sarah looks at her. Her eyes are dark, unreadable. She slides her hand out from under Rachel’s skirt and over Rachel’s knee and her fingers are there for a heartbeat too long and then she’s leaning back again. “So what’s next,” she says. “Lipstick?”
She looks completely serious. There’s blood in her cheeks; it’s not blush, Rachel didn’t give her blush. God, she looks beautiful. Rachel can see her own precise hand softening parts of Sarah’s face, sharpening others. Pygmalion at work.
“If you’d like,” Rachel says mildly. Sarah curls her hands around the edge of her chair, leans forward again. She’s so close. Rachel hasn’t let anyone touch her in years but she’s driven mad by the curl and tap of Sarah’s fingers over her chair, the way her hands aren’t where Rachel wants them to be. She wants Sarah’s hands on her thighs – wait. No. She wants to repaint Sarah’s nails, and rub lotion into the cracked angles of her knuckles, and then she wants Sarah’s hands on her thighs.
She picks pink. Soft, almost unnoticeable. The very tips of her fingers tremble when she pulls the lip gloss wand free – she can still feel her words hanging in the air, just a slight vibration. She thinks, again, about butterflies. About earthquakes. About holding your breath. She should have never let those words out, and she knows it, because now they are hanging there. What is an order that isn’t obeyed? Nothing, nothing.
Here is the joy of owning someone: they can never tell you no. Here is the problem of Sarah: Rachel only owns her skin-deep.
For now.
She presses the applicator to Sarah’s lower lip and drags. Sarah maintains eye contact with Rachel and Rachel is so warm. She wants, and hates herself for it. The wet pink shine of Sarah’s slightly open mouth. Her upper lip. Rachel caps the lip gloss, tilts her head to the side, considers. Here Sarah is: the most beautiful thing that Rachel has ever made.
“I’m finished,” she says, and puts the lip gloss down on the table. It clicks, like a gunshot.
Sarah watches Rachel’s fingers trailing over the makeup on the table, watches Rachel start putting it away. Rachel won’t look at her anymore. Rachel has given Sarah too much of herself – the more Sarah looks at her face, the more Sarah can see all the pieces of it she’s put together. She showed Sarah how she made herself. And now Sarah knows. Here is what Sarah owns: Rachel’s skin. Rachel’s wants.
Her tongue keeps darting out to tap against her own lips – the feeling of the gloss is too strange, all of this too strange. But that’s only because she’s wearing another girl’s skin: another girl’s hair, another girl’s jacket. Some other girl who could feel the gloss on her lips and want another sort of pressure there instead.
Rachel’s fingers aren’t quite still. There’s a tremor there – small, but. There. Does Rachel know, that Sarah can see it? That Sarah knows?
God, to think that Sarah stood in that elevator and she was intimidated. To think she sat across the desk from Rachel and thought – for a second – about signing, just to stop Rachel from looking at her like that. She almost let Rachel own her.
She watches Rachel’s profile. Her blood is pounding war drums, singing. Now now now.
“Rachel,” she says, voice soft, and when Rachel turns Sarah leans forward and kisses her.
Her hand lands back on Rachel’s thigh, to balance, and Rachel lets out a soft hiccup of a sound – barely even there. But Rachel kisses her back. Her hands tangle in Sarah’s hair, cup her skull like it’s something she is trying very hard not to break. Sarah’s hair slides smooth between Rachel’s fingers and Sarah wants Sarah wants Sarah wants. It’s a heartbeat, it’s the pound of drums, it’s a rhythm to move her body to. They’re both leaning closer, closer, so close they’re almost just one person. Sarah’s mind is just an endless ricochet-list of all the places their bodies are touching: Rachel’s thigh under her hand, Rachel’s knee bumping against her knee, Rachel’s mouth, Rachel’s hands, Sarah’s skin. With her eyes closed again it’s the same dark. It’s the same damn dark.
Sarah opens her eyes – and realizes that Rachel’s eyes have been open the entire time. She breaks the kiss and realizes she’s gasping for breath, like she’s run a marathon. Like she’s just done something very very stupid.
Rachel’s lips are slick with spit, kiss-reddened; her lipstick is smeared with the gloss she’s put on Sarah’s lips. Sarah can’t stop looking at Rachel’s lips. She leans forward again—
Only to be met with Rachel’s hand on Sarah’s chest, the heel of it jamming into her breastbone. The sharp v of the blazer frames Rachel’s hand perfectly, like she’d chosen it for just that reason. Like she’d known.
“Bed,” Rachel rasps. For a second the two of them just watch each other – they’re both waiting for Sarah to say no again, to push it, to make Rachel – just once – say something honest. But if she pushes this Rachel will shatter, she knows, she knows.
“Bed,” Sarah says. Pauses, adds: “Take off your shoes.”
Rachel blinks at her; her brow furrows. Sarah slides back in her chair, breaking off all those points of contact. Sits. Waits.
Rachel’s eyes dart to various points around the room and her eyelashes flutter and she does it, reaches down and slides her heels off almost unbearably slow. Has she ever taken off a piece of clothing because someone told her to? Ever? Sarah wants – horribly – for the answer to be no, for Sarah to be the only one. She wants wants wants.
But Rachel’s shoes are off now, her feet are bare, and they are finally the same height. Sarah leans forward. She kisses Rachel again.